"The man of archaic societies tends to live as much as possible
in
the sacred or in close proximity to consecrated objects. The tendency is
perfectly understandable, because, for primitives as for the man of all
premodern societies, the sacred is equivalent to a power,
and, in the last analysis, to reality. The sacred is saturated with
being...(R)eligious
man deeply desires to be, to participate in reality, to be
saturated with power...(T)he completely profane world, the wholly
desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the history of the human
spirit...(D)esacralization pervades the entire experience of the nonreligious
man of modern societies and that, in consequence, he finds it increasingly
difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in
the archaic societies."
- Mircea Eliade